ABSTRACT
The Lincoln-Douglas debates are justly regarded as the greatest in American history. Whatever their intrinsic merits, the magnitude of their consequences, for good or evil, is incalculable. Popular tradition has surrounded the debates with the aura which, in retrospect at least, always attends a clash of champions. Lincoln—following Clay—insisted that Mexican law continued to apply in the absence of specific repeal. Now there were never, in the vast territories of Utah and New Mexico, more than fifty-one slaves. Douglas sought a formula which, while guaranteeing the exclusion of slavery from the territories, and hence from the new states, would remove the slavery issue as a bone of national contention. Paper concession or not, it was the signal for one of the greatest political upheavals in this country's history. The prevailing, though largely implicit, is this: that he had a perfect right, as a professional politician, to keep alive any issue that might bring him to power.
